


Nine Black Poppies

by Wheat From Chaff (wheatfromchaff)



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Begging, Facial Shaving, Jealousy, Light BDSM, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Shaving Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 15:02:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13906533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheatfromchaff/pseuds/Wheat%20From%20Chaff
Summary: They were a unit, a wholesome, sweet thing. A story that Billy and all the other unwanted doe-eyed fucks in the system would tell themselves before they fell asleep. Frank talked about his family like he couldn’t help himself. Sometimes Billy wondered if the only thing that lived in that head of his was them. Like he was a prism, breaking the beam of them up into disparate pieces for the rest of the world to see.Billy decides Frank needs a shave and he's just the guy to give it to him.





	Nine Black Poppies

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in the same AU as my previous stories, where Billy finds Frank before Micro and things kind of unravel from there. This one would take place a little earlier in the timeline than the previous two. Frank has started to break but he's not completely tame.
> 
> Big thanks to ssealdog ([AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sealdog/pseuds/sealdog)/[Tumblr](http://ssealdog.tumblr.com)) for beta'ing!! again!! 
> 
> Title is from a the Mountain Goats song. [Specifically this version of the song which has slightly different lyrics from the album version](https://soundcloud.com/nyctaper/mountain-goats-nine-black-poppies-live-at-city-winery-3). i'm sorry i'm like this.

It had to be warm, for starters. The air in the cell Frank was forced to call home was normally clammy, cold like a seaside cave. Billy had told him more than once that he was lucky—upstairs, in the refurbished penthouse factory lofts Billy called home, the air could get stagnant, sun-baked by August heat through all the tall, panelled windows. This never seemed to make Frank feel any better.

Today, Billy needed it to be warm. He plugged in a humidifier, touched the thermostat for the first time since the days started stretching, tightening across the long hours like guitar strings.

“You lookin’ to sweat me out?”

It wouldn’t take much. Frank was always warm. Something about big guys, something about having the kind of body, the kind of muscles that Frank had, meant that he ran hot.

“Not exactly,” Billy replied. He flicked the leather parcel open, unrolling it across the wheeled cart he’d parked behind Frank’s chair. Silver instruments gleamed in the pool of yellow-white light from the single bulb above their heads. A line of aluminium and plastic bottles stood sentry on one end of the table. “You’re startin’ to look a little scruffy, Frank.”

He’d stripped down from his jacket and vest, tugged his tie loose and unbuttoned the top few buttons of his steel blue shirt. He picked a straight razor from the table, tested its heft in one hand.

Frank turned his head, tried to follow what Billy was doing, but Billy’d set up in his blind spot. “Sue me. It’s hard to shave without a mirror,” he said. “And that razor you gave me couldn’t cut through water.”

“Yeah, well.” This razor was heavy, but maybe Frank needed heavy. Judging by the growth on his neck and face, he’d let his grooming slip for more than a few days. “Mirrors and decent razors are for good boys. Boys who aren’t gonna try to carve my jugular out with any sharp object they can get their hands on.”

Frank actually laughed, irrepressible dick that he was. “C’mon, Bill. I haven’t tried anything like that in weeks.”

“Sure. I’m feelin’ real lulled.” The next razor was lighter. Yellow light beaded like liquid on the edge of its recently sharpened blade. Billy flicked it open and shut with a thoughtful air. “Safe and sound. Why don’t I just cut that ziptie and hand you one of these, seeing as you’re so docile and well-behaved now.”

Frank tried to crane his neck, a bead of sweat trailing down the line of his jaw as Billy watched. “I don’t even know what you’ve got.”

Like that little girl with the bears, Billy found what he was looking for on his third try. A sturdy blade, well-distributed weight, and a polished handle that felt warm and familiar in his hand.

“Why don’t I hand you my pistol while I’m at it,” Billy went on, ignoring him. He circled around the chair, dragging the cart with one hand behind him. “Loaded and everything.”

Frank tipped his head back as he approached. One corner of his lips curled up in a warm smile that didn’t touch the winter frost in his eyes.

“Why don’t you, Bill?” he asked. He didn’t once look away from Billy’s face, not even when the straight razor in his hand caught the light.

Billy tossed one of his own smiles back, like a grenade with its pin pulled.

He picked up the coiled strop, attached its hook to the corner of the table, stretched it taut and began to sharpen the blade.

* * *

They invited him for dinner, although there was no occasion.

It was late April, and the weather had finally, finally started to turn. The days had been getting longer since January, but it was only just now that it felt worth anything. The sun hung in the sky, finally prepared to put in a decent day’s work after spending months slacking behind cloud cover as thick as curtains. Wind still sliced cold when it came off the water, and the spectre of winter still lurked in the shadows of tall buildings, but the city could handle it because it was the death rattle. The bloody, broken nails still clinging to the ledge. May was right around the corner, with its damp air and rising temperature, heavy as a boot.

It was barely above 50 degrees but after months of wind chill and snow, it felt like a trip to the tropics. Billy wasn’t the only person in Queens wearing his jacket open.

He walked from the bus stop, the bottle of wine he’d bought at the Whole Foods knocking against his hip with each step. It’d take him twenty minutes, but he didn’t mind. It’d take him even longer when he started to slow down, and he minded even less.

He told himself he just wanted to enjoy the weather, but the sun was starting to lose its grip, sliding down the curve of the sky to place a golden kiss on the Manhattan skyline. The wind picked up its knives, dulled from the day’s warmth, but still sharp enough to cut through the front of Billy’s cotton v-neck. It shook the boughs and stirred up the garbage that rolled through the cracked streets. Even out here, in what was becoming a nice part of the city, trash accumulated. He kept his sunglasses on as the sky turned red.

“Billy!” Maria’s smile split her pretty face. “So good to see you!” She always sounded like she meant it.

“Hey, gorgeous.” Billy could sound just the same, could sound and look and smile like the kind of man who’d been wandering the desert for years only to come upon the oasis that was the Castles’ home. A place to put up his feet, where he could feed his starving soul.

He leaned down and kissed her cheek. She kissed the bristle of his beard, her drug-store brand lipstick no doubt smearing. He’d have to wait until she turned away before he could wipe himself clean.

He stepped inside and the dance began. First step was the offered bottle and the ‘oh-you-shouldn’t-haves’. She waltzed Billy past the warm entrance hall, past all the framed photos of her happy, smiling family, while he spun his ‘stop-it-it’s-the-least-I-could-do-smells-delicious-in-here’, each word another step, taking him further from the red sky at his back, winding the springs inside of him tighter and tighter.

It did smell nice. Like garlic, cheese, and basil, the way Billy used to imagine those fancy kitchens in pasta commercials would smell.

“Uncle Billy!”

The kids were a little easier to handle, although they dragged noise with them like cans tied to their ankles. Frank Junior made more of a racket running down the stairs than a high school marching band’s bus made rolling over a cliff.

He launched himself at Billy and Billy crouched just in time. Ever since he’d gotten back from deployment, Junior’s little boulder head was just the right height to launch with painful precision into his mid-section. The first time he did it, Frank nearly choked laughing. Billy gave him a look like napalm, but that just made him laugh harder.

It was a strange time of Billy’s life. Everything about him had been sharp back then. Sharp-tongue, sharp-wit, sharp-eyed, the edges of him pounded to precision on the anvil of hard living, and he wore it everywhere except on his angel face. Back then, he was tough, but he was still, in a lot of ways, becoming. It was that awkward stage of metamorphosis, his next, true self locked away in the safety of a cocoon while parts of him turned to liquid.

Even back then, before the suits and the cars and the company, if Billy gave someone a _look_ , it could knock them back a step.

But not Frank. Never Frank.

Junior was a ball of energy, chatting happily about the latest game Maria had caved and bought for him. The kind of war games all his friends liked to play were banned from the house, so Junior played sword and sorcery fantasy shit instead. Like Maria thought killing people was okay if he did it with a spiked mace or a fireball instead of an AK-47. He bounced around them, like an untrained puppy nipping at their heels as Billy drank the beer Maria’d given him.

“Give your Uncle Billy some space, kid,” Maria said. She’d retaken her place at the kitchen counter, an ancient chef’s knife in her hand and a cutting board piled with fresh herbs in front of her. “He just got here.”

Billy took a pull from the bottle and smiled wide. “Hey, it’s fine. I never get to hear about dragons in my regular day-to-day. I’m poorer for it.”

The kids weren’t big on letters, not the way they used to be. Junior and Lisa preferred emails or Snapchats, Face Time calls on the rare occasions their squad were posted in a place with decent reception. Ephemeral stuff. Frank always complained.

They used to send hand-drawn pictures. Little stick families with sticky crayon smiles, uneven eyes, and hair like explosions from behind lopsided heads. Every picture’d come with bragging rights, and Frank became one of those insufferable TV dads who couldn’t shut up about their kids’ apparent talent for at least a week. Like no one had ever drawn a square with a triangle on top and called it a house before.

Anyway. Billy had been grateful when that stopped.

Lisa seemed to grow in contrast to her little brother. She’d gotten quieter, lurking at the edge of what felt like every social situation Billy shared with her. Even when they were seated at the same table, she’d find a way to withdraw. Eyes on her plate, mouth shut, her cheeks pink and turning pinker every time she accidentally caught Billy’s eye. She’d started to giggle when he talked to her.

She stood outside the kitchen now, half hidden behind the door frame, pushing her heel into the ground and swivelling her skinny leg. Puberty had started pushing at her from the inside out, her very own metamorphosis in progress. Everyone had started to notice that she wasn’t just getting bigger, she was getting more grown-up. But not Frank. She’d always be his baby girl. Billy smiled wide when he caught sight of her.

“Hey, there she is,” he said. “The most beautiful girl in New York.” He winked, just to watch her turn red.

The kids were easy enough. Billy had spent enough time in group homes to perpetually be someone’s older brother. A rotating cast of annoying little siblings had sharpened another edge in him.

Kids were easy, but it didn’t mean that spending time in that sun warm kitchen, with the oven glowing like a hearth, and the smell of good food in the air, and all those smiling faces on the wall… that it didn’t pull something from Billy. Each second spent at the mercy of Maria’s hospitality was another cut.

She had her back to him, but she turned over her shoulder to talk. The strap of her dress had started to slip down her arm. She had creamy skin, like the girls in daytime soaps, filmed behind a soft lens.

White skin, brown hair, blue eyes. All-American sweetheart. It seemed like she was perpetually in sundresses, even in winter. They talked about nothing of consequence, words meant as links to carry them from one interminable moment to the next. He made a joke, she laughed.

And it’d be easy. It really would be. She had her back to him. That knife was sharp but she’d never used it on anything more challenging than a chicken carcass, and Billy had training. Billy’s hands were callused, scarred from it. She was so proud of her knives. She got them sharpened at the farmer’s market.

How would he do it, though? Quick or clean? He took another swig, bubbles hissing up the neck of the bottle while Maria asked him about his new place and how he liked the weather. She was always asking him questions, picking away at him. Small talk was a tricky thing for an orphan; without family to ask after, what was left? She always tried.

“It’s good. You know, Brooklyn’s a pain in the ass to get to, but at least I’m not far from the bridge.”

“Tell me about it,” she said. “Coming to Queens after spending my life on the Upper West Side was a hell of an adjustment.” Of course she came from that bougie-ass borough, of course she came from good, rich stock. “At least Brooklyn’s kind of cool. You can spend time with all those hipsters I keep hearing about.” She smiled at him. He smiled right back.

Clean, maybe.

He could be silent, creep up on her like a growing shadow. The kids were already distracted, lured away to another room by the siren call of their glowing screens. He picked at the corner of the beer label with his thumb. He could have her in a lock before she could blink. Cradle her delicate throat in the crook of his elbow and tighten himself like a vice around her windpipe. He could bend back, just enough to skim her toes across the linoleum, feel her pulse throb against his skin and listen to her rattle and choke her way to the end of her life.

“You might fit in with them,” she went on.

He laughed, self-deprecating and so charming. “I don’t know about that. I don’t shit about, like, local bands. Craft brews. I don’t really care to learn.”

“You look the part, though,” Maria said. The knock of her knife against the wood as steady as a heartbeat. “I bet there’s not many places that’d turn you away from the door.”

The label peeled strip by curling strip down the sweating bottle, progress edged along by the rounded tip of his thumbnail.

Quick might be better. Kinder. There was a long, thin boning knife with a soft, wooden handle hanging from a magnetic strip on the wall. He could approach her in silence, pull the knife from the strip, and slide it across her neck as easy as an exhale. Open her up and paint the kitchen floor. Frank had mentioned just how good she looked in red.

It’d take seconds. She’d barely feel it. He could even hold her.

Billy made it to the end of his beer before he finally asked, “Where’s the old man?”

Out in the backyard, apparently. Stationed in front of the barbeque he’d pulled out of storage the second the icicles hanging from the rooftop gutters had begun to drip.

There wasn’t much green out here, not while spring was still drawing its earliest breath, but the snow had gone at least, leaving behind a patch-work spread of brown and yellow. Billy’s brand new boots sank half an inch into the thaw-soft ground. The whole city was damp with melt.

Smoke curled up around Frank’s head as he prodded foil-wrapped packets of vegetables and chicken pieces on the grill. Billy made no sound at all as he approached. He watched the pull of muscle along Frank’s neck as he tilted his head; a stretch of vulnerable, thin skin above the rumple of his hoodie. Exposed.

Billy pressed the cold bottle in his hand against it and laughed when Frank jumped.

“Asshole,” Frank snapped, taking the beer.

“You make it too easy,” Billy said.

* * *

Frank still did.

“It’s a sort of luxury thing,” Billy said as he spread clear shaving gel over Frank’s cheek. “The kind of luxury that didn’t use to be a luxury, like getting milk and eggs delivered to your doorstep. Our granddaddies might’ve gotten a proper shave every day on their way to work. Or so I assume.” Billy placed his fingers under Frank’s chin and tipped his head back.

“Old school shit,” Frank said as Billy worked the gel into the stubble on his neck. “Did old school barbers keep their shops like saunas?”

“They used hot towels back then,” Billy said absently as he reached over and set the bottle aside. “These days you can just do it after a shower. Let the steam soften things up. But I thought you were getting tired of the cold air, Frank.” He picked the razor up from where it lay on the tray, balancing the underside of the blade on his thumb. “You kept complainin’.”

“Doesn’t mean I wanted to move to Florida,” Frank said.

“Bitch, bitch, bitch.” Billy tipped Frank’s head to one side, exposing the curve of his neck, the pink crescent of his ear. Unable to resist and feeling unconcerned, Billy touched the velvet-soft skin of his lobe. “You didn’t use to complain so much.”

“Yeah. Weird,” Frank said as Billy traced the line of his jaw. “So. At these, uh, barbershops our granddads used to go to. Did the barber usually sit on their lap?”

Billy smiled. He curled his legs around the back of Frank’s chair, drew his fingers down Frank’s neck, brushing against his bobbing throat.

“Nah,” he said. “You had to pay extra. Who had that kind of money in the Depression?”

“Times really were tough,” Frank said.

It was easy, this back and forth. Natural. Like they were back in Afghanistan, killing time between killings, with nothing better to do than to verbally poke and prod at each other.

Like Frank didn’t have his hands ziptied behind his back. Like Billy wasn’t on his lap with a straight razor sharp enough to slice through silk cradled in his hand. Like there wasn’t a river of blood between them, twisting like a snake down the trajectory of all the turns Billy had taken over the last 10 years.

Billy placed the edge of the blade at an angle just under Frank’s ear. He placed two fingers on his chin and pulled the skin taut. Frank’s throat dipped. Billy took the first stroke.

“There,” he said softly. “Easy.” Frank closed his eyes.

Billy worked carefully, just as he’d learned. It took time. He made his way from the jaw to Frank’s cheek, drawing the blade down in long, careful strokes. Frank held still under him, as pliant as a doll, as Billy turned his head with slight touches.

“Not so bad, is it,” he murmured.

Frank grunted. “Regular shave would be quicker,” he said. He grunted again as Billy pinched the skin under his ear, but didn’t flinch.

“Don’t be an ingrate. Do you know how many people would kill to be in your position right now?” he asked.

It was still warm, although Billy had turned the thermostat down before he took his seat. Strands of hair clung to his damp forehead, sweat beaded on his neck and chest. Frank burned under him, contact-warm under Billy’s thighs. It was almost too much for Billy. It must’ve been unbearable for Frank.

Billy shifted, moving a little further up Frank’s lap. A small vein began to throb at Frank’s temple. Billy smiled.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“How’d you even learn this stuff?” Frank asked, dodging.

Billy didn’t like being ignored, but he was feeling indulgent. The warm air and the rich, herbal scent of all his finest face lotions and shaving gels left him feeling close to happy. A blade in his hands was always a welcome sensation. He drew it down, gentle and slow, curving around Frank’s jaw.

“You doubtin’ my ability with a blade, Frankie?” he asked.

Frank opened one eye at last, fixed Billy with a squint. He flicked his gaze down to Billy’s expertly trimmed beard.

He’d gotten to Frank’s lips. Half the face done, and Frank was right. It really did take a while.

Billy smiled, a little rueful. “Hey, if I didn’t have the beard, I’d get carded goin’ to an R-rated movie.” He touched two fingers to the corner of Frank’s lips and pulled the skin taut. “We can’t all be as rugged as you, Frank. Besides,” he went on. “I’m not inexperienced. Who do you think takes care of this scruff? You think I go out and hire some stranger to touch my face?” He flicked the blade, quick and controlled, down the small patch of skin between Frank’s nose and lips.

* * *

Billy had never been so full in his life. It was always like this at the Castles’. Apparently, it was the burgeoning Italian grandmother in Maria (or so Frank liked to boast)—she couldn’t abide a skinny guest. The way she’d go on sometimes, you’d think she’d never had a guest as skinny as Billy. Any time it looked like he was in danger of seeing the bottom of his plate, she’d appear with a ladle and a serving platter. She only stopped when Billy begged her.

Quick or clean? But now Billy was too tired to move. Angel hair pasta in vodka rose sauce, grilled chicken and asparagus, garlic bread, and salad. And wine, on top of the two beers he’d had before. He kind of hated that she was such a damn fine cook. He gave her half that sentiment, letting his eyes winkle when he smiled at her.

“I feel like you’re fixing to put me in the ground every time I come,” he said, leaning back in his seat with both hands on his stomach. She laughed. “Death by delicious food. The kind of end fit for a Roman emperor or somethin’.”

“Only the best for you, Billy,” Frank said he collected his dishes.

“I’m gonna die and it’s gonna be your wife’s fault,” Billy told him as he passed, his head falling against the back of his chair.

“This might be a bad time to tell you about dessert,” Maria said, clear blue eyes gleaming like chips of ice.

 _God_. Blue eyes. What kind of person had eyes like that in real life? Maria was just so fucking pretty, like she’d been airbrushed into their world by some spiteful prick who’d had it in for Billy.

She laughed when he groaned, and even that was beautiful. Maybe it was better like this. Maybe it was better for her to be perfect. If she had something wrong with her, some little flaw—a snort in her laugh, or a gap-tooth, or a fucking hangnail or something. If she got grouchy, or if she was a poor loser, or if she ever yelled at her kids. Or got jealous.

Maybe that would’ve been worse.

“You’re killin’ me, sweetheart,” he said and she laughed again.

“Flourless chocolate cake!” Frank called out from the kitchen, over the sound of water filling the sink. “Maria’s family recipe. Best thing you’ve ever had, guaranteed.”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s exaggerating.”

“He’s bragging,” Billy said. Frank always was.

Billy volunteered to help with the clean-up but they both hustled him out of the dining room before he could even get close to the kitchen. Another familiar step in their little hospitality dance.

Maria took the lead again, insisting in a rising voice that he was their guest and he didn’t have to help, and he should just sit and stay with the kids for a while. Billy might’ve had more fight in him if he hadn’t just eaten enough food to feed their army. Feeling thoroughly drugged on carbs, he let himself get taken into the living room and deposited on the couch.

Junior and Lisa were both there, curled up on opposite ends of the sofa, with the blue-light glow of their phones on their little faces. Billy sat between them, rested his head against the over-stuffed back of their Sears brand couch and stared at the reflection of light on the ceiling.

He could hear splashing coming from the kitchen, and music. That slow stuff Maria liked, sugar pop songs from the 60s and 70s. Frank never listened to that shit unless he was here.

Billy could feel his pulse slow. His gaze tracked to the walls, to the dark frames and barely visible people behind glass. Smudges where Junior had, years earlier, drawn a marine as tall as he possibly could. He’d stood on a chair to do it. To protect the home, or so the letter said, while his daddy was away.

They were a unit, a wholesome, sweet thing. A story that Billy and all the other unwanted doe-eyed fucks in the system would tell themselves before they fell asleep. Frank talked about his family like he couldn’t help himself. Sometimes Billy wondered if the only thing that lived in that head of his was them. Like he was a prism, breaking the beam of them up into disparate pieces for the rest of the world to see.

Billy watched the light from Junior’s screen flicker above and wondered if maybe he really had been drugged. Or maybe it was just the drink.

Frank Castle was a family man. Billy could hear his voice now, a quiet murmur in the kitchen, too low, too rich with affection to be understood. The loving husband. The doting father.

Except. Except.

 _Except_ Billy had seen parts of Frank no one else had ever seen. Except for the blood on his hands, under his nails, down to his elbows, splashed on his chest. Except for the bruises, the scrapes and the cuts where shrapnel had gotten him, where a stray bullet had winged him, where another bastard got lucky, only for a second. The snap of bones. The growl deep in the cavern of his chest, rising like something prehistoric, some ancient monster about to emerge.

Billy’s head lolled to the side. He could see the gleam of Junior’s screen in the corner of his eye. Beyond the yellow lights of the wall sconces, beyond the open doors between the hall and the dining room, which led right into the kitchen, Billy saw Maria at the kitchen sink. Swaying her hips, skirt dancing around her calves. She was singing.

Quick or clean?

Did they know Frank was a killer? Maybe on paper. They knew his job, knew he went overseas to protect their country, serve with valour, all that shit. The same propaganda they’d been pumping into families since The Great War. But did they know their daddy, their precious husband, the man who hugged them, and pet their hair, and tucked them in at night, could beat a man to death with his bare hands? That he had? That Billy had seen him do it?

That afterwards, when they’d both gotten home—their real home, in that tent with not enough privacy and too much downtime—that Frank had practically yanked Billy’s arm out of his socket pulling him to their spot behind their supply crates? Turned him around and shoved him down over a box, put his hand on his hip, yanked his pants down to his knees. Pressed flush against him, hotter than hell and twice as deadly, breathing into his neck, burning him with every exhale. And when Billy got noisy, he’d stick fingers that still tasted like blood in Billy’s mouth, push down on his tongue. Let him drool and moan as he was fucked within an inch of his life.

“What’re you smiling at, Uncle Billy?” Junior asked, lured away at last from his game.

“Nothin’,” Billy said. He rubbed his eyes and cast his gaze down to the screen. A little man in fantasy armour huddled around a cooking fire. Billy frowned.

“Whatcha playing?” he asked, peering closer.

“Monster Hunter,” Junior replied.

Billy watched him play for a while, because it was easier to let his gaze slide out of focus, let his mind grow quiet. Staring at the screen, he didn’t have to look over at the cut-out of light through the hall, where he could still hear the music playing. Still catch the flash of a swishing skirt.

After a few beats of silence, Billy became aware that he was being watched. When he looked over, he found Lisa staring. She snapped her gaze back down to her phone, flushing cheeks obvious even in the washed out light.

His smile spread slowly. “Hey, Lisa,” he said. “You’ve been awful quiet tonight. How’s things at school?”

Lisa had her legs pulled tight to her chest, curled up like she wanted to disappear. “Fine,” she said.

“You got a boyfriend yet?” he asked. Her face burned. “You’re what—eleven now? Your ma tells me you’ve started goin’ to dances. You must’ve at least touched a boy on his shoulder.”

“Nooo, oh my god.” She pushed her head down, buried behind her knees. Billy laughed.

“She’s always on her phone,” Junior said helpfully.

“Of course she is. Beautiful girl like you, Lise, you must get all kinds of boys messaging you.”

“Gross!” She giggled into her hands. “No way!”

“Boys looking to take you out for ice cream. Sendin’ you Snapchats and friend requests and whatever. However you kids do it these days.” It was easier to talk, and he liked making Lisa laugh. The noise filled the space growing behind his eyes, at least for a little while.

“Gross!” she repeated.

He slid across the sofa, leaning over until he was within kicking distance. He gave Lisa one of his finest ‘shithead older brother’ grins. “Breakin’ hearts all over town, am I right?”

She took the invite, knocked her foot out lightning quick against his thigh. “No!” Her face was bright red behind her fingers.

“What about you, Uncle Billy?” Junior asked.

Billy straightened. “Me?”

“Yeah.” Junior’d sprawled out over the couch, his face half-buried in one of the dozen or so fat throw-cushions Maria kept around the place. He watched Billy with one visible eye reflecting his screen. “Do you have a lot of girlfriends? Dad says you do. He said you have their numbers in your phone. How many?”

It’d gotten quiet and now Billy could hear the music again. Another slow pop song, the kind that played while the screen turned hazy in old movies, and boys would put their hands on girls’ round hips and sway them slowly in a circle. In the kitchen, he could see Frank with his hands on Maria’s hips, swaying along with her from behind, his face buried in her neck.

Lisa fidgeted, tugging her long hair over her mouth. “Do you…” Voice quiet and hesitant, such a change from her childish shrieking a moment before. “Do you have, like, a special girl, Uncle Billy?” She was chewing on her hair, a habit they were trying to break her out of. Billy supposed he should tug the strands from her mouth, do his part to play on her parents’ side.

He turned his head instead, looked through the hall, to the movie still playing out in the kitchen. The water was still running, the Bluetooth speaker still playing, but neither Frank nor Maria were washing dishes. They were dancing, just like they did in dreams.

“Uncle Billy?” Both kids stared at him, confused.

Maria put her head back on Frank’s shoulder, as he slid his hands down her hips, and she laughed.

* * *

Don’t get sentimental. Don’t get any ideas. You get what you get and you smile and thank the god who doesn’t care about you that you got _something_. Billy had it straight. There was an order to things, and he’d known, from a young age, where he fit in to it all. He could keep his head right.

Attachments were weaknesses. People were liabilities. Nothing came without strings. That friendly older boy who offered to teach you how to jack car stereos? That sweet smilin’ girl with the nose ring and the good hook up? The teacher who took you aside and told you about how much potential you’ve got?

Nothing came for free. At least when the recruitment officer—a big, barrel-chested guy, with straight white teeth and broad hands, the kind of guy who probably played Captain America during playground theatre—caught Billy’s wandering eye, and gave him a special smile, Billy knew going in just what the strings would be. He was eager for ‘em. He’d always wanted to hold a gun.

Billy was on the cusp of 18 at the time, and getting prettier by the day. The system that’d chewed him up was preparing to spit him out, headlong into a future that opened as wide as a subway tunnel with an oncoming train. The girl with the hook-up was hinting about taking trips down to Seattle, where all the good shit could be found. The kid who’d taught him how to jack stereos said he had good hands. Nimble fingers. Plans turning like gears behind their glassy eyes, everyone with something in mind for Billy’s future.

The teacher who’d talked about Billy’s potential had taken him to a quiet room, not long ago. Locked the door behind them. Billy got straight A’s all year.

Maybe he was tired of looking around and seeing the other dipshit kids with college brochures in their greasy little hands. Maybe he was tired of listening to the burn-out losers talk about their planes to hitch-hike and train-hop their way out west, shouting to be heard over their boombox nu-metal. Maybe he was tired of thinking about 18 as a line in the sand, a place where one world ended and another had to begin, one where the shitty safety net he’d been clinging to for the last 15 years would finally get cut out from under him.

Maybe that was why, when Sergeant Apple Pie gave him a smile and a brochure, and told him all about the things he could do to serve his country—the same country that’d paid for his upbringing—instead of giving him the cheesy, insincere smile and tossed off answers he gave any adult who tried to talk to him, Billy listened.

“They’ll give you structure,” he said to Billy, reading him as easily as the declaration of independence. “Three square a day. Extra, probably, if you ask for it.” His smile widened. “They’ll put meat on your bones. Make you strong. Like me.”

Billy should’ve laughed in his face. Instead, his gaze drifted down to the sergeant’s biceps which strained against the fabric of his uniform. It should’ve been funny, but Billy didn’t feel like laughing.

“More than that, you’ll get a place where you fit. Give you a future.” The sergeant tipped his square chin up, caught Billy with his sea glass green eyes. “You’ll find out where you belong.”

So full of shit. Billy should’ve thrown the brochure onto the folding table and walked away. He glanced at the sergeant’s arms again.

“Bro, what was that?” A kid whose name Billy hadn’t forgotten because he’d never bothered to remember it caught Billy as he left the little card table. “You gonna go shoot fuckers in the desert now? You gonna be some jarhead? Protect our freedoms and shit?”

“Yeah,” another nameless kid asked. Smoke dragged past her face. Kids like these were always smoking behind things. “You gonna go kill terrorists for oil and shit now?”

There was that humour Billy was chasing, coming to life in his chest. He plucked the cigarette from her sparkly blue lips and put it between his own. And smiled while she turned red.

“Nah,” Billy said. “I told him to go fuck himself.”

* * *

“You didn’t answer my question,” Frank said.

Billy flicked the excess gel from the edge of his blade onto the towel he’d folded over his shoulder. “What question was that?” he asked.

“How’d you pick this up?” Frank had to speak carefully while Billy worked, dragging the blade down against the other side of his face, over the smudged history of a fading bruise. They were three-quarters of the way done, by his estimation.

Billy didn’t reply immediately, focused on placing just the right amount of pressure as he made another pass over the curved topography of Frank’s cheek. “There was this barber shop down the street from my foster family. The guy who ran it’d pay you five dollars if you swept his floor or washed his windows or whatever.” Another flick. “Seemed like a sweet deal at the time.”

“Paying a bunch of minors well under minimum for a day’s work.” Frank shifted a little, thighs rubbing against Billy, lifting him with the slight movement. Easily. Billy was still skinny. “Sounds like it might’ve been a sweeter deal for him.”

“Yeah, well.” Billy wiped the blade, tipped Frank’s face to a new angle, and resumed. “Taught me a few things about the way of the world, at least. Anyway, he wasn’t a bad guy. He let us pick the radio station, gave us lollipops, chocolate bars, butterscotch candies. He was nice.” His strings were nothing, in the grand scheme of things. Billy leaned closer, intent on his work, his chest pressing flush against Frank’s. “And five dollars could buy a few rounds at the Mortal Kombat machine in the Laundromat next door.”

“Shit.” Frank chuckled, the movement bouncing Billy a little. “I loved that game.”

“Me too. I got real good at it. Started bilking punks out of their lunch money around that time,” he said, pulling the skin on Frank’s chin down before taking another swipe. He tracked a bead of sweat trail down the hollow of Frank’s cheek. “I must’ve told you this.”

“Must’ve. It rings a bell. You played Scorpion, right?”  

“And Sub-Zero,” Billy confirmed. “I liked the ninjas.”

Eight years spent at the hip, living in the space of the other’s exhale. Billy felt certain he’d spilled every one of his meagre secrets, all the maudlin trash from his childhood, all the rapscallion, neighbourhood-trouble bullshit he used to get into. The stuff that’d get him taken to the principal’s office, sent away to a different foster home. He was always someone else’s problem.

He told Frank things he’d never told anyone else. Not because they were precious but because he’d never cared enough to share before. Christ, they’d had so much time. Frank had been one of the only people Billy could talk to for more than fifteen minutes without wanting to reach for his ka-bar.

Frank gave him everything in return and Billy became an expert in the History of Frank Castle. They bonded over their delinquent childhoods. Frank’s parents had left him early on, stayed out of his way, too tired to do shit while he ran wild, and then they left him and everyone else for good. When Frank had shared how quickly they’d died, one after another, Billy couldn’t tell if he felt jealous at Frank’s freedom or angry on his behalf. Both were a little weird. Billy’d heard sadder stories in his years, but that was the first time he’d actually cared.

“So, this barber. He teach you how to do this?” Frank asked.

Was this new to Frank? Billy supposed it could’ve been. After eight years, his memory had gotten hazy. It felt like he’d spilled everything at one point or another.

“Not exactly. I used to watch him do it,” Billy replied. All the little movements that Billy hadn’t even noticed—the way Frank had been bouncing his knee, the occasional twitch at his neck, his jaw—stopped.

“You’ve never done this before.” Frank’s voice had gone flat. Billy shrugged, flicked more gel from his blade.

“I’ve got good eyes. I’m a quick learner. And I watched a tutorial video before comin’ down here. On GQ dot com,” he added, grinning as Frank fixed him with a one-eyed glare. “C’mon, Frankie. Don’t you trust me?”

The face looked good. Clean and pink. Billy touched his fingers to the underside of Frank’s chin and tipped his head back, exposing his throat.

Frank didn’t reply. Billy set the edge of the blade against the bottom of Frank’s neck, eyeing the growth of stubble there. “This is the tricky bit,” he said. “Gotta follow the grain. The skin here’s so sensitive. Thin.” He adjusted his grip on the razor, eased forward in Frank’s lap.

Frank remained silent. Billy took the first pull.

“You used to trust me,” he said, drawing the blade up Frank’s neck in a quick stroke.

A soft breath puffed from Frank’s parted lips. His eyes were open, but they were fixed on the ceiling. Billy could see the glow of the bulb overhead, reflected like twin stars.

“I trusted a costume, Bill,” Frank said, voice rough. “An empty mask.”

Frank grunted at the next swipe, too hard and too fast to be comfortable. The skin turned red in the aftermath. Petty.

“Look at that,” Billy muttered, nostrils flaring. “Wreckin’ my good work. You’re always bringing out the worst in me.”

* * *

A lifetime of meeting new people, moving from home to home, added another edge to Billy’s arsenal. Growing up scrawny had made him a target, left him with few natural defenses. He’d been forced to be sweet, to be nice. Charming. Even if it exhausted him.

It served him well in the marines. Boot Camp might’ve been rough for some, but Billy’d grown up with big men screaming in his face. Foster dads and bad uncles with fat, pink cheeks, thinning hair on their shiny heads, cheap booze on their breath, sometimes scripture on their lips. He could fall asleep listening to it. He’d done so in the past.

Billy wasn’t like those softbodies in his unit, the big men who’d come up in the comfort of some little ranch home, getting fat on mom’s tuna casseroles. Mail day would come and he’d be one of the only people to stay empty handed. He stood out, and in the crucible of social pressure cookers, that got him some attention. Most of it wasn’t good.

They called him Mr. Magazine, because he looked like he walked out of one. They called him other, less savoury things, too, but that was fine. Just barking dogs. It was practically a lullaby.

Billy could talk fast, which kept him out of trouble. He could be funny, too. He could pick out the next weakest link in the chain, pinpoint his insecurity, and toss it to the slavering masses like a hunk of cheap steak. And that could be enough, most of the time.

But there was always someone, in every foster family, in every group home, in every classroom, in every change room at the Boys and Girls Club, always someone who thought he was just a little too much. Too pretty, too smart for his own good, too puffed up with his own sense of importance. The world was a crab bucket, and everyone was looking for the next leg to hook with their grasping claws.

Billy’d gotten good at spotting them. They fit a certain mould. Usually big, usually kinda ugly, usually sporting acne scars on their faces, half-healed scrapes on their hands. Dressed in dark clothes, tank tops and hoodies. A hard look in their screwed up, mean little eyes. They’d look at porn on their phones while everyone else was trying to sleep. They’d be the first to come up with dumb, insulting nicknames for everyone else. They’d push to the front of the line in the cafeteria, knock their way through the rest of their lives, snorting and barking at anyone who’d get in their way. And they’d watch Billy, lips pulled back in a puppydog snarl. Almost cute.

Billy was good at spotting jumped up, muscle-bound trouble on two legs before it could get to him. The first time he laid eyes on the man who’d taken up residence in the cot beside his, the slab of beef known as Frank Castle, he thought: ‘Here he is.’

* * *

They thought he was drunk, which was funny.

Billy told them—told Maria, who hovered and wrung her delicate little fingers together, fussing like the mother he’d never asked for—that he was fine, it was fine, he could walk twenty minutes in fucking Queens without getting stabbed or falling in front of a bus. (He didn’t say it quite like that—Lisa was hanging around during this particular verse.) But Maria could go toe-to-toe with her husband when it came to being stubborn.

“Let us call you a cab,” she said.

“I told you, I don’t need one.” He smiled when he said it, shrugging off her concern with his hands stuck in his pockets.

“It’s not a problem,” she insisted.

He kept smiling, kept it showing in his eyes, while his gaze drifted to the framed pictures on the wall, and his fingers twitched because they knew how easy it’d be to grab a fistful of her long hair and slam her beautiful face against her smiling family, smashed glass in her cheek and she’d fall, stunned but not dead. He’d have to keep going from there. It’d be neither quick nor clean.

This wasn’t like Billy. He was not a stubborn man, really. He could bend when the occasion called for it, when it seemed like it might make things easier. He liked it when things were easy.

“It’ll be fine. It’s not like I’m some co-ed from fresh off the bus from Poughkeepsie.” It didn’t matter. Why was he still talking about this? Just take the damn cab, end the fucking night, what’s wrong with you, Billy?

If she looked at him with those big blue eyes for another second he was gonna snap and she was gonna break. All over the floor, all over the wall, up and down the stairs, and he could turn their nice little golden home into a slice of hell and he wouldn’t have to draw a weapon to do it. He could practically hear it, the dull thunk of her against glass and wood, as if he’d already started.

He stepped back from the open door, into the night that waited for him. Cold air wrapped around him like an emergency blanket for shock patients.

Maria looked ready to push, ready to step out after him and god, he really might kill her if she did. He didn’t want anything she had to offer him.

“You’re so skinny you might slip through a storm drain.” Frank loomed behind her, already wearing his boots and a hoodie, keys jingling in his hands. “And then we’d have news vans and police cloggin’ up the street, looking to pull little Billy Russo out of the well. Forget it,” he said when Billy opened his mouth. Frank had edges too, and Billy always knew when they were coming out for him. “I’m walking you to the bus stop.”

“Fine,” Billy said, relaxing. “Whatever you need to make yourself feel better. Although, for the record, I don’t—“

Frank swiped his big hand over the back of Billy’s head, half a smack and half something else, pushing his hair out of place. “Yeah, yeah. Tough guy. C’mon.”

“Thank you again for the lovely dinner, Maria.” Now it was easier. The aggression melted away and Billy could relax. He raised his hand in a farewell and she smiled back, looking relieved. Maybe just to see him go.

Billy started walking but not before he caught sight of Maria swaying towards her husband. Frank joined him a moment later, catching up easily because Billy wasn’t trying to lose him. They fell into step with each other, as easy as if they’d never left it.

* * *

In some ways, Billy was right. Frank Castle was trouble. Just… not in the way he’d anticipated.

He looked the part. Looked the same as the others who’d come before him—big guy, kinda ugly, scars on his face and hands, poorly dressed, the works—but he wasn’t those guys.

All those instincts in Billy’s head, the ones that’d kept him alive and in one piece, were ringing their alarm bells. He felt primed, electric with adrenaline, every time Frank got close, but Frank didn’t _do_ anything. He didn’t push other guys around (except playfully, when they pushed first), he didn’t pick on anyone who couldn’t take it, and never stepped past anyone’s boundaries. He actually seemed to notice people had boundaries in the first place, which was novel. He didn’t talk much and when the other guys tried to conflate that silence with stupidity, he just… let ‘em. Called them assholes but with laughter in his voice. Like he had nothing to prove. He made friends easy. Everyone liked Frank.

Within a few days of meeting him, Billy began to wonder if maybe he’d gotten it wrong.

Frank didn’t talk, but Billy did. Gained a reputation for it, one he was happy to keep. He made sure he said the kind of things people liked to hear, and people kept him around because of it. He could lead conversations like he was conducting. He was the guy people called over when they were bored, or playing cards, or just looking for something nice to look at, something sweet to listen to.

Frank watched him. Even when Billy wasn’t looking, he could feel it, ancient parts of him reacting to a perceived predator, some kind of lizard brain shit. And when Billy did look, try to catch Frank out, Frank just smiled. Not even the way guys like him usually smiled at Billy. It made his heart kick up in his chest. Unacceptable.

Billy grew fed up with staying on guard for the blow, and decided to take a more proactive role. He did what seemed like the smartest thing, and started ingratiating himself to Frank. He sought him out, teased him every time he plucked out some tune on the company’s shitty acoustic guitar, asked him about the drawings he got in the mail, made fun of his accent. He made Sun Tzu (or Machiavelli? Whatever) proud, opened his figurative arms and let Frank get closer than he normally let anyone get. When Frank finally came for him, he’d be ready.

It paid off, eventually. Sort of. Frank did come for him, finally did something Billy had expected a guy like him to do. He gave him a nickname.

It happened while they were bragging, that same locker room talk that bored and exhausted Billy, even as he smiled and joked his way through it. He talked about all the broken-hearted, wet-lipped, girls with eyes that shined with gulping desire, who sang for him with full-throated pleasure when they took him home, took him into their beds.

Frank said it as he walked past, his hand brushing Billy’s by what could’ve been a mistake (because they were always in each other’s space, that was the nature of their life out there, skin close, breaths mingling, you got over the no-homo thing real fast) almost too low for anyone else to hear.

“Billy the Beaut.” He sounded amused. His dark eyes gleamed in the crinkle of his smile.

It stuck.

* * *

“I don’t need babysittin’,” Billy insisted.

It was a fine night, just cold enough to let Billy wear his jacket and jeans without sweating. He had his glasses hooked in his shirt collar, pulling the cotton down low enough to give anyone interested a little peek at the goods.

They strolled through the residential streets, past the sensible four-door sedans parked on the road, little trikes left out on the curb, abandoned basketballs deflating on short driveways. They walked past brown-green lawns with skeletal trees, already starting to bud. Billy didn’t know shit about flowers, but he could recognize the short, black-barked trees with the big white flowers, waxy petals that bruised purple from their hearts. White buds ready to explode and die before the first breath of summer could even stir, brief as fireworks.

Nice houses. Colourful clapboard siding, concrete steps leading to white doors, front windows with the curtains drawn. The kind of place Billy used to imagine for himself, before he learned to dream bigger.

“Yeah, right. Billy Russo don’t need nothin’ from nobody, right?” Frank asked, dropping his voice to an approximation of Billy’s east-coast patter. His eyes crinkled with a smile that hadn’t gotten to his mouth yet.

“Wise guy,” Billy said, playing to the stereotype. He gave him a shove, and Frank shoved him back. Their steps faltered, but they always returned to each other, pulled back to each other’s trajectory.

“What was your wife so worried about, anyway?” Billy asked.

Frank cast him a sideways look. “Maria? She just worries.” He paused, and Billy could practically feel him weighing his next words on his tongue. “You had a little more to drink than usual.”

Had he? A few beers and maybe some wine, but he didn’t think that was any more than he usually put away. People always thought he couldn’t handle his liquor just cause he was skinny. Frank should’ve known better.

Billy stared at the puddle of light on the grey pavement. Frank _did_ know better. If he said he’d had more to drink than usual, then that must’ve been exactly what Billy had done. As if summoned by the realisation, a shot of pain throbbed behind Billy’s brow, like a knitting needle shoved in the crease of his eye, an omen of the morning-after aimed right for him.

They walked without speaking. The sounds of an early spring night in Queens—quiet breeze, distant rumble of far-off traffic, voices raised on other, less peaceful streets—filled the space left between them.

Frank had that look on his face. The one that told Billy that he was really thinking about what he wanted to say.

A rock bounced off the toe of his brand new boots. He could make it easy for Frank, start talking, get ahead of it. Steer the conversation someplace safer for the two of them, let them both relax.

He didn’t. He wanted to hear Frank ask.

And Frank didn’t disappoint. “Everything okay, Bill?” he asked.

Billy couldn’t explain why it made something warm flourish inside of him, a strange growth with a trajectory he couldn’t predict. That was just the kind of thing that happened to him when he was around Frank.

He’d gotten what he wanted. He could just make something up, make a joke, get them both back on track. The reigns were in his hands.

But Frank had asked something of him. Billy turned his head to the side, tracking movement behind closed blinds.

“It’s… It’s the noise,” he said.

Frank didn’t reply. When Billy glanced his way, he saw that Frank was watching him, looking all drawn and serious. Like it what Billy said next mattered.

“D’you know there’s a pretty major intersection beside my place?” Billy said. “It’s not even quiet at night. I can hear buses wheeze past at all hours. I swear every bus in this city’s got breaks that squeal. The walls are so thin, too. Of my apartment, I mean. The old guy who lives beside me, he must be fuckin’ deaf. I can hear Pat Sajak ask about vowels and Ice Cube talk about kidnapped children and dead hookers every night. I can hear the couple above me when they’re feelin’ conjugal.” He smiled, because at least that was a piece of familiarity. Even if it made him lonely.

“Conjugal, huh?” Frank hummed. It was still cold enough that his exhale created a brief flash of silver vapour, thin as tissue and gone in a snap.

“That word-a-day calendar of mine payin’ off,” Billy said. Frank nodded, and said nothing else. Waiting. Billy looked away. A shadow disappeared under a car—a cat or a raccoon scurrying in the dark. “I miss the quiet.”

It was and wasn’t true. He missed…

Missed listening to the sound of eight other people breathing. Missed laying on a hard cot, with a thin pillow folded under his head, staring up at the canvas roof and watching it pull and shift. Like the throat of some great creature. The hiss of a desert breeze, the flutter of other tents, of the tarps they’d pinned over everything they couldn’t strap down. Missed watching dawn rise over the mountains, red and purple, vibrant and truly tacky. Watercolour sky.

Missed hearing the quiet snore five feet from his head. The long inhale and the rumbling exhale, coming from a chest large enough to nurture it.

“See, I’ve got the opposite problem,” Frank said, his voice hooking Billy back in the moment. “It’s the quiet that gets me. First few nights are okay, y’know.” He sniffed. “All the jetlag keeps me under. The novelty of having a real mattress, a real pillow, Maria in bed with me.”

Billy kicked a half-chewed tennis ball down the street. “Right,” he said.

“But after a few nights, it all changes. I’m woken up by the things I’m not hearing. Heart racing. You know?”

Billy wondered what he sounded like at night. More than one person had told him he talked in his sleep.

They were getting closer to the subway, and the city roused itself to life around them. Old row-houses rose like steps to a close heaven, packed tightly together, offering no room for the horizon to breathe. Low strip-mall, shop fronts clung to the road on either side, crouched like something prepared to pounce. Cars with shithead kids behind the wheel rumbled past, over-blown exhausts roaring, bad music trembling through nice sound systems. Billy used to love New York. This place used to be his home.

“I don’t know how you do it, Frank,” Billy said, but it wasn’t what he meant.

“I know.” And the hell of it was, Frank probably did know. Billy’d never met anyone before who could tune into his wavelength. He wondered if it’d spoil him, one day.

He slung one heavy arm around Billy’s narrow shoulders and pulled him close, knocking them together for a step. “I’m sorry you’re having a hard time,” he said.

Billy huffed, a flare of old pride lighting in his chest. “It’s not like that,” he muttered. “Don’t talk to me like I’m one of— one of them.”

“One of who?” Frank asked.

“You know.” Billy nodded at a man passing on the other side of the street. “One of the guys who didn’t get out in time. That’s not me.”

“You haven’t gotten out at all,” Frank reminded him, and Billy couldn’t tell if that was an agreement.

“It’s just the noise,” he said. “Sound and fury. Signifying fuck all. You know.”

“I know,” Frank said again. Two words, and it was all it took. Two words and Billy unwound. Frank could always play him so easily. He patted Billy on the shoulder. “It’ll get easier to come home,” he said. Billy hummed, thinking of wide skies and the taste of dust and sunlight on the baking air. “Once you find someone nice, settle down. Get a family of your own. Then you’ll see. It’ll get—whoa!” Frank gripped Billy’s arm, trying to steady him. “You okay?”

“Fine. Fine.” Billy could barely hear himself through the distant ringing in his ears, as if someone had fired a rifle inches from his head. He gave it a shake, trying to clear it, but something was coming up. His chest rattled with his inhale, shaking like something that was about to hatch.

Frank peered into Billy’s face, and Billy found himself in the dizzying position of being the object of his sole focus. The part of him that’d always sing with pleasure under Frank’s hands warbled like something shouting under water.

“I’m gonna call you a cab,” Frank said.

A family of your own. Something real. Something stable, permanent. The kind of storybook ending Billy used to dream about.

Not some shitty tent, not taking orders from some asshole with a hard-on for medals, not looking at the world through the narrow focus of a scope, or tuning a shitty beater guitar, or dealing hand after hand of cards with a bunch of guys you can only kind of stand.

Not pulling some skinny kid aside, pinning him against an outcropping and keeping him quiet with one hand while you worked him open with another. Tours were just summer camps for grown-ups, and the people in your cabin you pretended to like as long as you were there.

Real life. Not laying in a cot, watching the ceiling breathe, falling asleep to the sound of another man snoring.

Billy shook Frank loose. He pushed his hair back from his face, tried to reclaim his style. He might’ve said he was fine again.

It must’ve been the booze. The rest of the night dissolved away.

Billy remembered climbing into the cab Frank flagged for him, but he didn’t take it home. He went to a bar in Brooklyn Heights and found himself some tank-top wearing, protein-swilling, gym-rat fuck who seemed more than happy to take him home. Happier still when Billy pushed him face down into the mattress, twisted his arm behind his back, and fucked him ‘til he cried. ‘Til he screamed the name he thought was Billy’s.

* * *

Billy could be a strong man in many ways. He could resist temptation. He could live without comfort, without wealth, without anything soft. He grew up in a lack. He could go back, if he had to.

But the whole point of everything he’d done, of the life he’d built for himself, meant he didn’t have to. That he never would, ever again. So, why deny himself the things he wanted, when they were so easily taken? It didn’t make him soft. There was nothing soft about this.

Nothing soft about Frank, about Billy’s arms around his straining shoulders, about his legs curled behind the chair. About the drag of their bare skin, about the sharp press of the razor’s handle, slippery with sweat in Billy’s grip, about his hand clutching the back of Frank’s head, fingers digging into his curling hair. Frank nosing at Billy’s throat, mouthing at the sharp line of his clavicle, smearing blood from fresh, careless cuts across his skin. Sweat dripped down the curve of Billy’s spine, down his neck, down his bare chest where it pressed flush against Frank’s.

Frank buried to the hilt inside of him. Just like old times.

Billy’s grip tightened, fisting at the back of Frank’s head while he rode Frank. Each breath shoved out of him as he rolled his hips, Frank thrusting into him as best as he could with both ankles bound to the legs of his chair.

“Billy.” His voice rough, words shredded in the building rumble in his throat and chest. Billy could feel it growing inside of him, like something ancient, some monster from before humans could reason themselves into people. He sighed and tipped his head back, gave Frank his throat.

“You feel so good, Frankie,” he said. He bent his neck, pushed his nose against the top of Frank’s head, curled his free hand around Frank’s bare cheek. Drew his thumb down the smooth curve of it. “Just… just what I wanted. So good on my skin. You’re gonna stay like this for me. I’m gonna keep you like… like this.”

He felt Frank’s quiet laugh against the sensitive part of his neck. Frank dragged his lips across the juncture of Billy’s shoulder, opened his mouth, and bit.

Billy groaned, his cock jumping with an erratic thrust between their stomachs. He bent his thumb down on the razor’s shoulder, the blade curving over his fingers like a scorpion’s tail. He yanked on Frank’s hair, pressed his face against his shoulder, panting hard.

Close. He was so close. It was like all the stories, all the movies, all the porn. Like something building and building inside of him, a storm about to break and wreck him from the inside out. It was only ever like that with Frank, with his fat cock nestled deep inside of him.

Frank pushed his face up, knocking Billy’s chin with his nose. Billy felt Frank’s breath burning his lips, and when he opened his eyes, he found Frank staring at him. Eyes half-lidded, pupils blown large, a black that consumed all the sweet chocolate brown. Their noses brushed together and Billy was inches, less than inches, from Frank. From his Frank.

Frank’s hips lifted from the chair, an off-rhythm thrust that put flashing stars in Billy’s head. Billy shouted and Frank surged up, capturing his lips. Billy groaned, tasted blood and bitter herbs from the shaving lotion, and didn’t pull away. He trembled and wished, for a desperate, bloodless second, that he could cut the ties on Frank’s limbs, have his arms around him while he shook himself apart.

The edge of the blade bit into the back of his knuckles. Frank took his lower lip into his mouth and sank his teeth into the plush skin and Billy was finished. He came with a groan, his whole body flinching like he’d been shot.

He slumped, curled and trembling, against Frank, breathing hard and waiting for his heart to slow.

Frank nosed at the soft skin under his ear. “ _Billy_.” He sounded so desperate. Almost sad. “ _Please_.”

Billy should’ve just slid off. Disengaged and left Frank to suffer, unsatisfied. It would’ve been no better than he deserved. He had to earn his way back to Billy’s good graces and he had a lifetime of hurt to make up for.

Billy leaned his forehead against Frank’s, trying to catch his breath. He should’ve just left. But he felt so weak, boneless with spent pleasure, and Frank felt so good inside of him. A hot pulse at the centre of him. He shook his head slowly, rubbing against Frank, hair falling over his face.

“Finish if you want,” he said. “If you can.” He laughed, breathless. “I ain’t gonna fuckin’ move.”

Frank growled. Of course he did. He pressed his feet flat against the floor and jerked his hips, thrusting into Billy as hard as he possibly could. Billy laughed, feeling his exhale warm against the closeness of Frank’s cheek, and held on.

Frank turned his head, found Billy’s lips again and didn’t even hesitate before kissing him, open mouthed and filthy, the way he never would before, the way he never had. And Billy just let him, his smile fading as Frank slipped his tongue inside, groaning sweetly.

Billy’s shaking thighs tensed and it was almost too much. Frank was always almost too much, almost too hard, too fast, too painful, but Billy would never complain. It was a point of honour. He held on, clenched down, moaning into Frank’s open mouth, until finally, finally he finished Frank off. Frank shuddered, splashing hot into the core of him. Billy moaned, the sound muffled by Frank’s mouth. He wasn’t proud of it.

They lay together for a spell, Billy slumped over Frank, long limbs loosely wrapped around him. He rested against Frank’s head, pressed his nose into his hair and breathed in the smell of the shampoo he’d left for him. He could feel Frank’s breath puffing against his shoulder, feel his spent pleasure drip slowly out of him. Frank grew soft inside of him—he was not a young man—but neither of them moved to disengage.

“Billy,” Frank whispered as he kissed lazily along his neck.

“Yeah…” Billy’s breath puffed from his open mouth.

His fingers played in Frank’s hair, twisting the curled locks. Frank tried to pull back, tried to meet Billy’s eyes. “I used to dream about stuff like this. Back when I was a kid, watchin’ that barber work. Smooth cheeks and good men.” He drew his fingers down Frank’s face, scraping the blunt, rounded tip of his manicured nails across his cheeks. “Now I’ve got it but sometimes it doesn’t feel real. Does this feel real to you?”

He pinched Frank’s chin in a pincer grip, his thumb and forefinger pressing tight on either side. Frank’s expression shifted, post-coital bliss melting into something else before even that vanished.

“Yeah,” he said, very careful. “Yeah, of course.” He looked into Billy’s eyes, a brief stab in the depths under his brows. “Doesn’t it feel real to you?”

His lips were so close that Billy couldn’t see them, but he could feel them, feel their edges tickle against his skin. Frank had kissed him twice now, without any hesitation that Billy could sense, and that must’ve been a sign.

He leaned down and kissed Frank, soft at first, the way he might kiss a woman who’d bought him enough drinks. And when Frank opened up to him, he pressed down and got less sweet. Kissed the way he might kiss a woman who he’d pinned against the wall of her apartment.

He felt almost guilty when he heard himself moaning. But he’d come too far, and there was nothing to be ashamed of here. He pet his fingers through Frank’s hair.

“Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “Yeah, this is real.” He pressed his forehead against Frank’s, kissed the sharp curve of his cheek. “This is perfect.”

**Author's Note:**

> in case it's not obvious by now, I Have A Thing for male grooming habits. 
> 
> Did you know I'm on tumblr? It's true: nothingbutchaff.tumblr.com


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